Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,48
assumption that President Trump loses in 2020. Should that happen, Democrats will get the short-term results they seek. But at what cost? They will have completely undermined any credibility the FEC once had. When the FEC becomes a partisan attack dog, who will police the side in power? No one. The institution that had traditionally played that role will have been sacrificed on the altar of Democratic power grabbing.
Beyond the many provisions of this bill that provide advantages to Democrats, the real casualty of this power grab is the institutions that have to be sacrificed to give Democrats what they want. The bill is riddled with constitutional violations that undermine natural rights. One could fill a book with the list of ways H.R. 1 violates the Constitution, but for our purposes, we’ll conclude our analysis of this bill by looking at just a few of them.
Violating the Constitution
You don’t have to spend too many minutes on your browser’s search engine to find a reference to Donald Trump as an authoritarian who is a threat to our institutions. Nicholas Kristoff in a January 2019 New York Time piece reiterated the old criticisms of President Trump as someone who is “unraveling democratic norms” and who seeks to “undermine institutions and referees of our political system.”
Don’t look now, but the Democrats made unraveling our democratic norms and undermining our institutions their top priority in the 116th Congress. The first institution on the chopping block: the Constitution. More specifically, the Bill of Rights. H.R. 1 runs afoul of many constitutional provisions, including federalism (the Tenth Amendment), voting rights (the Fourteenth Amendment), free speech (the First Amendment), and the separation of powers set forth in Article III. In addition to usurping local control of elections, the bill restores voting rights to convicted felons, a move that illegally abridges the authority of states explicitly granted in the Fourteenth Amendment. It forces taxpayers to fund campaigns, imposes restrictions on political speech, and empowers Washington, D.C., judges to decide state redistricting conflicts.
H.R. 1 would be more aptly named the “From the People Act” because that’s what it is. It takes power away from the people—from the representatives in their communities whom they know and interact with—and invests that power in decision makers who are completely inaccessible to the average American.
Federalism, the constitutional innovation that created a division of power among federal, state, and local governments, enables diverse communities to self-govern. As a result, communities holding very different values can still be part of a larger whole without compromising their priorities. The process of transferring power away from state and local governments and into the hands of the federal government is a process of taking power from the people.
The advantages of an approach that allows California voters to tax themselves into oblivion without harming nearby Utah voters who overwhelmingly support smaller government are many. Federalism is a far better tool for promoting diversity than identity politics could ever hope to be because it does not impose the values and policies of one group over another. It disperses power, which protects against tyranny. It allows government to be more responsive to local issues and problems in a more efficient way than a slow and unwieldy federal bureaucracy. And federalism creates an environment in which more people can interact with the policy makers who represent them, even as more policy makers can be drawn from local communities.
Federalism has been under attack since Alexander Hamilton first proposed the formation of a national bank in 1791. Politicians have been at work trying to grow the federal government ever since. Let’s look at how the “For the People Act” actually takes power from the people.
Wresting control of local elections seems to top the Democratic wish list in this bill. The bill seeks to penalize routine voter list maintenance, micromanage online registration and voting processes, dictate the use of no-fault absentee ballots, and neutralize the impact of voter ID laws.
Democrats justify this power grab with wild claims that states are deliberately attempting to suppress votes. But research from the left-wing Brennan Center for Justice at New York University contradicts that narrative. They report, “More broadly, 31 states have filed or pre-filed at least 230 bills that would expand voting access. That far surpasses the 14 states, at least, where lawmakers have filed or pre-filed at least 24 bills thus far that would restrict voting access.” The Brennan Center considers any bill that requires photo ID to be a bill that restricts voting access.
In reality, states